US Files Charges At Two ‘Chinese Government Hackers’

Two Chinese men belonging to Advanced Persistent Threat 10 hacking group are charged by US authorities

Two men belonging to a hacking group affiliated with China’s main intelligence service, have been charged by US authorities.

Zhu Hua (Godkiller) and Zhang Shilong (Atreexp) allegedly worked for a company called Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Company and “acted in association with Chinese Ministry of State Security, the US court filing reveals.

They were members of a hacking group operating in China known within the cyber security community as Advanced Persistent Threat 10 (APT10), the court document reads.

US charges

And this year the British of Ministry of Defence (MoD) admitted that sensitive data had been compromised on multiple occasions by outside forces.

APT10 was identified as hacking IT suppliers in order to obtain military and intelligence information.

And now the two Chinese men are accused of conducting extensive campaigns of global intrusions into computer systems between 2006 and 2018.

They are said to have hacked into 45 commercial and defence technology companies in at least 12 US states, hit a number of countries including the UK, and hacked into US Navy computer systems and stole personal information of more than 100,000 personnel.

FBI director Christopher Wray is quoted by the BBC as saying that the two men were at present “beyond US jurisdiction”.

“This campaign is one of the most significant and widespread cyber intrusions against the UK and allies uncovered to date, targeting trade secrets and economies around the world,” UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is also quoted as saying.

“These activities must stop,” said Hunt. “They go against the commitments made to the UK in 2015, and, as part of the G20, not to conduct or support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property or trade secrets.”